


parallel

by procrastinatingbookworm



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Character Study, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-22
Updated: 2018-08-04
Packaged: 2019-03-22 09:12:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13760910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/procrastinatingbookworm/pseuds/procrastinatingbookworm
Summary: There are some things even demons cannot stomach, some things even the Devil fears.





	1. red hair and screaming

They wear different skins, different bodies, traversing the millennia. Every year takes them further and further from the Garden, but they never quite escape each other.

 

Aziraphale’s forms don’t all have red hair, but they all have dangerously bright eyes, just like her. They both tend to stand in a way that would make one think of a cat, though whether it’s a housecat or a lion depends entirely on the day. (He tends toward the former, and she toward the latter, but they have shades of both.)

 

Aziraphale and War, War and Aziraphale. Shaky-steady hands curled around the hilt of a flaming sword, neatly manicured nails with blood underneath them. Heeled boots. Screaming.

 

Aziraphale created War, presented her to humanity, left her in Eve’s head and hands to be found and used. He almost manages to regret it. Almost.

 

-

 

They meet often, maybe once every decade, in passing, at some conflict that they are both drawn towards and helped create. She smiles at him, and he scowls at her.

 

She is Red, she is Helen, she is Carmine, she is War. The sword she’s using isn’t _the_ sword, but it’s _a_ sword, and any sword she holds bursts into flame.

 

They meet on hundreds of battlefields, over thousands of bodies, too many conflicts to name.

 

One would think that Crowley was the first to call the Earth what it was—their side—but it was War.

 

“Is this one-” a gesture at the battlefield around them. “Heaven’s-” a glance upward “-or Ours?”

 

“It could be Hell’s,” Aziraphale counters, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth. War laughs.

 

“Nah. Too brutal for that. Too driven. Too _powerful._ Hellish battles are more… rushed. Badly-constructed. Destruction for the sake of destruction. Motivated by little demons whispering in higher-ups ears. Not like this. Not so…” she makes a sound in her throat, pleased and dangerous. “ _Real_.”

 

Aziraphale is quiet after that, stays quiet until they part ways. He silently vows to apologize to Crowley for a dozen wrong accusations.

 

His next body has red hair.

 

-

 

They have both been mistaken for each other, but War will never be an angel, and Aziraphale will never find violence (between humans, at least, he is the exception to every rule he sets) anything but tasteless. They both have red hair (sometimes) and danger in their eyes (always) and wings.

 

Aziraphale has wings, messy, oft-unseen wings. They are parchment-colored and speckled and edged with gold, and they are a mark of his station, of his place, and he is ashamed of them.

 

War has wings made of fire, but they don’t let her fly and they scorch her hair, so she only uses them when she forgets herself.

 

Crowley thinks that she is Aziraphale, once, and burns for his trouble.

 

War is Hell, the humans say, but no. War is the fault of an angel, War is the mirror of an angel. War is not an angel, but Hell has never touched her. There are some things even demons cannot stomach, some things even the Devil fears.

 

-

 

Every passing day sets them apart, and draws them closer together, depending on how you look at it.

 

It depends whether you see War as a human ascending to some divine state, which would be _almost_ accurate, or as something divine becoming human, which would be equally close; depends on whether you see Aziraphale’s inexorable fall as toward humanity or toward Hell. Neither would be quite right, but then again, they’re both some measure of correct.

 

The apple never falls far from the tree — they cannot flee too far from their source, they cannot flee too far from each other.

 

-

 

“Why?” Aziraphale asks War, and she laughs and laughs and laughs through bloodstained lips.  
  
“Why what, angel? I’m only doing my job.” She smirks. “You might want to take notes.”

 

As with many of the things she says, he isn’t quite sure how to reply. He’s starting to think she does it on purpose.

 

-

 

No one is quite sure whether War _was_ Helen of Troy or if she was just there beside her, but either way, the war is brutal and ghastly and while Crowley stays far away, Aziraphale comes to see.

 

He doesn’t see her, but he can sense her there.

 

Then again, then again, he can sense her everywhere.

 


	2. two shadows

It was an accident, it was always an accident, but that changes nothing.

 

It’s not Eve’s _fault_ , and it isn’t Crowley’s either, but without either of them, nothing would have happened.

 

They are all afraid, the beings standing there under the Tree of Knowledge.

 

Crowley is coiled tight around his branch, hissing and concerned. Before anyone else, but far too late, he’s realizing the price of curiosity.

 

Aziraphale is half terrified that he will be punished for having failed and half terrified that the humans standing before him will be punished in his stead. He is right to be afraid, on both counts, but as he becomes so fond of saying, _it’s ineffable._

 

(He is wrong. It is not ineffable. It is not grand, or purposeful, or even unknowable. It all depends on the whims of a being that could be as easily compared to a human toddler as it could be to a nuclear bomb.)

 

Eve is only frightened because her survival instincts demand her to be, muscles tense and blood pumping, but she is defiant, and her nails dig into the apple in her hand.

 

Adam is a coward, and will always be a coward, and cowardice bleeds from him and down the line of his descendents. He is compliant, inches from running scared, but he cannot look away.

 

And _it_ is afraid, the presence twisting to life in the shadow of the tree, with the universe in its head. It can see the death of every human, from here at the beginning to the End Of All Things. Millions upon millions of lives snuffed out, everywhere and always. Time means nothing to it, everything is now.

 

Later it will have a name, a form, an identity, but for the moment it is a force, a shadow in its own right, a gap in the fabric of everything.

 

For the moment, it simply exists, confused and afraid and new, with the universe in its head.

 

In the tree above its head, the serpent closes its eyes and shivers.

 

-

 

Years later, the Serpent stumbles across a field that stretches out in every direction, past forgotten sacrifices that smudge the blue sky with smoke. The ground beneath his feet tilts and wavers, firm soil shading into blood-soaked mud.

 

Crawly—Crowley staggers and folds, lurching, hands fluttering as he fights the urge to catch himself on the bloody ground. He sinks down clumsily, kneeling beside Abel’s broken body. He reaches out, long-limbed and shaking, and closes the glassy eyes.

 

FITTING, FOR THE FIRST DEATH TO BE A MURDER.

 

Crowley, clumsy and strange in his new form, startles and shrieks, catching himself before he topples to the ground. He doesn’t look up. There is nothing there to be seen. The presence makes itself known in a pressure behind his eyes, the deep voice in his head.

 

I SUPPOSE I SHOULD SAY ‘BE NOT AFRAID’? NO, THAT COMES LATER.

 

“You’re Death,” Crowley says. His hands are shaking, streaked with mud and blood.

 

YES. YOU ARE THE SERPENT.

 

“This is my fault.”

 

ON A GRAND SCALE, IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO ASSIGN BLAME, GIVEN THE OVERARCHING NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE, BUT PERHAPS, IN THE SHORT TERM, THAT WOULD BE AN ACCURATE STATEMENT.

 

“So… he wouldn’t have died if I hadn’t…”

 

HE WOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN BORN.

 

The presence fades before Crowley can speak, and he’s left alone with the first of humanity’s fallen.

 

He can’t bring himself to move.

 

-

 

They do not meet again for centuries, but Death is everywhere and always, and most clearly in the back of Crowley’s head, a shard of consciousness, awareness, _knack._

 

Crowley is frighteningly accurate at predicting deaths. He can taste it, like wine or chocolate.

 

Sickness tastes like flower petals; heady and scented, cloying and choking, soft against the inside of his mouth. Old age tastes like sour candy, twinging in his jaw. Danger tastes like the dregs of sugar at the bottom of a teacup when you don’t stir it well enough. Poison tastes like cold black coffee, bitter and sickening. Preparation tastes like spoiled milk, clotted and sour and _wrong_.

 

If Aziraphale notices how whenever Crowley takes a detour on the way to the Ritz or St. James park or anywhere, there’s always an accident on the news later, on the street they avoided, he says nothing. If he realizes that Crowley’s scream came a split second _before_ they started to hear gunshots, he only grips the demon’s shoulders tighter. If Aziraphale wonders why Crowley picks the edible flowers off the dessert he ordered, why he turns down sweets, why he only ever takes cream in coffee or tea, why he flicks his not-quite-human tongue at the carton of milk before he pours anything from it, he says nothing.

 

-

 

Crowley, when he isn’t thinking about it, sometimes has two shadows. No one seems to notice, except for children.

 

-

 

Neither of them change all that much. Death sheds his cowled robe for a buttoned coat and a plague doctor’s mask, sheds that for a motorcycle helmet and biking leathers. Crowley changes forms, changes bodies, but he always has dark hair and sharp cheekbones and golden eyes and scales, and long fingers like a pianist, and a spatter of freckles across his cheekbones.

 

There is something to be said about that; but Crowley presses his lips together and flat-out _refuses_. In defiance, he draws power into his lungs and fingertips, breathes life back into the newly-deceased, and feels the sting of broken laws behind his eyes, burning across his skin.

 

-

 

Crowley’s wings are white, blindingly white, and his pinfeathers are edged with gold. He takes great care of them, and keeps them entirely concealed.

 

Death’s wings are spaces carved in reality, the emptiness beyond everything. They are as insubstantial and unknowable as the rest of him. Occasionally, stars or some other light will flicker in the abyss, but for the most part,

 

Crowley doesn’t know this, and Death may or may not, it’s never clear, but if you took hold of Heaven, took hold of the emptiness and the static buzz and the pure white light of every color overlapping, if you took hold of it and _pulled_ until it came away, peeling like old wallpaper, you would see the same darkness that composed Death’s wings.

 

-

 

Crowley sits cross-legged, watching the flames. Once, twice, a hundred times. He finds himself at the center of chaos, over and over and over again, standing on a cliff above the literal/metaphorical flames, casting the shadow of death, evermore, forevermore.

 

-

 

The Serpent breathes life into a dove, and the world begins again.


End file.
